Angelopolis(10)

among us. They have no soul and so they feed on the souls of human beings. Even a mediocre

angelologist can identify them easily. But you’re not like that. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have

believed you to be human. You could pass for one of us.”

“Do I frighten you?”

Verlaine shook his head. “I have to trust my instincts.”

“Meaning?”

“That you may look like them, but you’re not one of them. That you’re different. That you’re

better.”

Evangeline’s skin shimmered in the half light of the moon. He wanted, suddenly, to pull her close,

to warm her in his arms. Perhaps he could help her. He felt as if nothing mattered but this moment

with Evangeline. He brushed her cheek with his finger and slipped his arm around her, feeling the

dusty surface of feathers brush over his hand as he drew her to him. He wanted, for just a moment, to

feel as if the world beyond them was all a distant dream, an unreality. Angelologists and Nephilim,

the hunters and the hunted—all of this didn’t matter. In all of existence, there was only the two of

them. Verlaine wanted the illusion to last forever.

But holding her was like trying to embrace a shadow. She slipped away, her attention drawn to

something behind him. Verlaine caught a sweep of movement in the corner of his eye. Suddenly a car

pulled into the passage, its headlights breaking through the darkness. The door opened and an Emim

angel leaped from the car. Before he could move, Evangeline ran through the passage and, with a

speed and grace that he recognized as belonging to the most adept creatures, she lifted into the air,

landing on the rooftop above. The Emim angel opened her wings—large black wings, immense and

powerful—and flew after her.

1973 Alfa Romeo, rue Bosquet, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Bruno roved the streets, unsure of where to look for Verlaine. He’d discovered his Ducati

abandoned near the Seine, and Bruno knew instantly that his strange evening was only going to get

stranger. Something was going on with Verlaine, that much was obvious. He loved his Ducati and

was rarely without it. Leaving it thrown on the sidewalk—especially at this time of night, when the

restaurants and cafés were closed and the seventh arrondissement was little more than a calcified

forest of shuttered windows—was wholly out of character.

Bruno reached into his pocket, took out a flask filled with Glenfiddich Solera Reserve, and took a

long drink. The whole damn neighborhood was full of Nephilim. After his time in New York, he

thought he’d seen the worst of it. But the area between the Bon Marché and the Eiffel Tower had

proved to be the most concentrated collection of old-world Nephil families in the world.

Over the course of Bruno’s time as an angel hunter—thirty years of service in Jerusalem, Paris, and

New York—he had watched the Nephilim grow more and more reckless. It used to be that the

creatures feared exposure, creating elaborate methods to shroud their existence in secrecy. For many

hundreds of years, the creatures’ survival depended upon blending into the surrounding population of

humans. Now there seemed to be a total disregard for such machinations. Among the new generations

of angels there was a tendency toward exhibitionism. Reports, confessions, photographs, and videos

were everywhere. Once such testimonies would have been relegated to sensational magazines, their

claims printed next to UFO and yeti sightings. Bruno had watched it all with interest and, in recent

years, growing alarm. Such exhibitionism was pure arrogance: The creatures believed that they were

strong enough to come out in the open. And yet, strange as it might have seemed, Bruno had found that

the more the angels exposed of their secret lives, the less shocking they were to the human population.

There was no general awareness of them, no fear, no real inquiry into the nature of the Nephilim.

Human beings were so saturated with the supernatural that they’d become desensitized. Bruno had to

admit that there was a certain brilliance in it all: The creatures had chosen the perfect moment in

history to step out of their shadow existence. After thousands of years of living in seclusion, they’d

embraced the present era of exhibitionism.

Of all his agents, he believed Verlaine best equipped to handle the change in the creatures’

behavior. Bruno had studied Verlaine at the crime scene as attentively as he’d studied the corpse and,

as always, he’d liked what he saw: a young man with the potential to become a great leader. Sure,

Verlaine was still struggling to find his place in their organization, but he was talented. He was also

unusual, without the typical family history, without the normal education, and with a scary talent for